The increasing population growth resulting in the tremendous increase in consumption of fuels, energy, and petrochemical products and coupled with the depletion in conventional crude oil reserves and production make it imperative for Nigeria to explore her bitumen reserves so as to meet her energy and petrochemicals needs. Samples of Agbabu bitumen were subjected to thermal cracking in a tubular steel reactor operated at 10 bar pressure to investigate the effect of temperature on the cracking reaction. The gas produced was analyzed in a Gas Chromatograph while the liquid products were subjected to Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS) analysis. Heptane was the dominant gas produced in bitumen cracking at all temperatures and the r

Epoxy (EP) – Silica (SiO2) composites are well known composites used in microelectronic industry . So it is important to study their dielectric behavior under different conditions such as
the presence carbon black (UV absorber) and immersion in the water for 30 days .
Dielectric properties were calculated over the frequency range 102 – 106 Hz for epoxy composites with different weight % of micrometer 1.5μm SiO2 particles (60%, 65% and 70wt%) modified with 0.5wt% silane coupling agent to improve adhesion between EP and SiO2 phases .

The seedlings of vegetables are exposed to stress states, especially through the first period, due to injuring their roots by transplanting or heavy rain , so it is necessary to provide an available nutrient to recover the growth and increase their early yield, which means more income for farmers. In this regard, an experiment was conducted in the College of Agricultural Engineering Sciences, Agriculture Faculty, University of Baghdad, Iraq to study the effect of different types and concentrations of mineral fertilizers as starter solutions by using high nitrogen (N), high phosphorus (P) and neutral fertilizers (Q) at three levels which were 4 g/l (S1), 8 g/l (S2) and 12 g/l (S3) on broccoli growth and yield. The results showed tha

Proteus mirabilis is considered as a third common cause of catheter-associated urinary tract infection, with urease production, the potency of catheter blockage due to the formation of biofilm formation is significantly enhanced. Biofilms are major virulence factors expressed by pathogenic bacteria to resist antibiotics; in this concern the need for providing new alternatives for antibiotics is getting urgent need, This study aimed to explore whether green synthesized zinc oxide nanoparticles (ZnO NPs) can function as an anti-biofilm agent produced by P.mirabilis. Bacterial cells were capable of catalyzing the biosynthesis process by producing reductive enzymes. The nanoparticles were synthesized from cell free

Autism Spectrum Disorder, also known as ASD, is a neurodevelopmental disease that impairs speech, social interaction, and behavior. Machine learning is a field of artificial intelligence that focuses on creating algorithms that can learn patterns and make ASD classification based on input data. The results of using machine learning algorithms to categorize ASD have been inconsistent. More research is needed to improve the accuracy of the classification of ASD. To address this, deep learning such as 1D CNN has been proposed as an alternative for the classification of ASD detection. The proposed techniques are evaluated on publicly available three different ASD datasets (children, Adults, and adolescents). Results strongly suggest that 1D

Herpes simplex virus (HSV) is a common human pathogen that causes severe infections in newborns and immunocompromised patients. Conjunctivitis or corneal epithelial keratitis is caused by HSV type 1 all over the world and at all times of the year. The present study was aimed at detecting HSV in patients suffering from conjunctivitis. One hundred and ten (110) clinical samples (90 patients and 20 controls, both males and females) of eye conjunctiva swabs were collected from patients of different ages. The samples were analyzed using qPCR and ELISA techniques. The qPCR results revealed that HSV was present in 47 (52.2%) of the 90 patients who were infected. Of these patients, 25 (48.0%) were males and 22 (57.8%) were females, indicati

Several attempts have been made to modify the quasi-Newton condition in order to obtain rapid convergence with complete properties (symmetric and positive definite) of the inverse of  Hessian matrix (second derivative of the objective function). There are many unconstrained optimization methods that do not generate positive definiteness of the inverse of Hessian matrix. One of those methods is the symmetric rank 1( H-version) update (SR1 update), where this update satisfies the quasi-Newton condition and the symmetric property of inverse of Hessian matrix, but does not preserve the positive definite property of the inverse of Hessian matrix where the initial inverse of Hessian matrix is positive definiteness. The positive definite prope

Papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) represents the most prevalent kind of thyroid gland cancer, making up around 80% of all occurrences of thyroid cancer. Evidence shows that Syndecan-1 (SDC-1) expression is lost in a number of benign and malignant epithelial neoplasms, although its expression profile in thyroid gland neoplasms is yet unknown. Therefore, the aim of this study was to assess SDC-1 expression in papillary thyroid carcinoma patients, as well as the relationship between age and gender and SDC-1 expression. To undertake a detailed investigation of SDC-1 in normal and malignant tissues, tissue sections were used to examine SDC-1 expression in 70 tissue samples, 50 distinct PTC (6 males and 44 females) and 20 normal tissue ty